I represent the first generation who, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
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March
18, 1981

The
Greatest American Hero first aired.

Theseries that aired for three
seasons from1981 to 1983 on ABC. Created
by producer Stephen J. Cannell, it premiered as a two-hour pilot movie on March 18, 1981.The
series features William
Katt as
teacher Ralph Hinkley ("Hanley" for the latter part of the first
season), Robert
Culp as
FBI agent Bill Maxwell, and Connie Sellecca as lawyer Pam
Davidson.

The series chronicles Ralph's adventures after a
group of aliens gives him a red suit that grants him superhumanabilities. Unfortunately for
Ralph, who hates wearing the suit, he immediately loses its instruction
booklet, and thus has to learn how to use its powers by trial and error, often
with comical results.

The main character's name was originally Ralph
Hinkley, but after the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. on March 30, 1981, the character's last name was changed to
"Hanley". For the rest of the first season, he was either
"Ralph" or "Mister H". In the episode where Ralph is given
a promotion and his own office space, we see the name "Ralph Hanley"
on the door plaque. At the start of season two, the name had changed back to
Hinkley. In the season three episode "Live At Eleven", Ralph is given
a name tag at a political rally with his last name spelled "Hunkley"
and Ralph gives up saying "it's close enough for politics".

March 11, 1989

COPS debuts on Fox.

The hit reality-based television show COPS premieres on the Fox television
network, and audiences hear the reggae beat of its distinctive theme song,
Inner Circle's "Bad Boys," for the very first time.

Created by the producing team of John Langley and
Malcolm Barbour, COPS placed cameras and production crews in the car
with real patrol officers around the country as they went on raids and did
whatever was necessary to catch the perpetrators of various drug-related
crimes. The pilot episode, like the rest of that debut season, was based in
Broward County, Florida, and followed members of the Broward County Sheriff's Office. The
actor Burt Lancaster provided the voice-over for the pilot episode, but the
rest of the show, shot documentary-style, was not accompanied by any narration.

At the time, Fox was only a fledgling television
network, having launched in October 1986. The network took a chance on COPS
after other major networks passed on it, leaping on Langley and Barbour's idea
in the middle of a five-month-long strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA)
during the summer of 1988. A reality-based show was ideal for the network at
the time, as it would require no writers and was relatively inexpensive to
produce.

COPS
surprised the industry by becoming a hit; it is now one of the longest-running
TV shows in history, with more than 700 episodes airing between 1989 and 2008.
Its success spawned an entire new genre of reality programming that would gain
traction during the 1990s and become a major cultural phenomenon by the next
decade. Like any touchstone of popular culture, COPS has inspired
numerous imitators--including the John Langley-produced series Jail and Street
Patrol--and has been parodied extensively, most notably by the Comedy
Central series Reno 911!

In February 2008, producers released a special
two-disc DVD set to celebrate the 20th anniversary of COPS.

March 12, 1974

Wonder Woman debuted on
ABC-TV.

The show later went to CBS-TV.

Wonder Woman's first broadcast
appearance in live-action television was a television movie made in 1974 for ABC. Written by John D. F. Black, the TV movie resembles the Wonder Woman of the
"I Ching" period. Wonder Woman (Cathy Lee Crosby) did not wear the comic-book uniform, demonstrated no
apparent super-human powers, had a "secret identity" of Diana Prince
that was not all that secret, and she was also depicted as blonde (differing
from the brunette image established in the comic books). This 1974 film follows
Wonder Woman, assistant to government agent Steve Trevor (Kaz Garas) as she
pursues a villain named Abner Smith (Ricardo Montalban) who has stolen a set of code books containing
classified information about U.S. government field agents. Along the way, she
has to outwit Smith's chief assistants: the handsome yet dangerous George
(Andrew Prine) and a rogue Amazon, Angela (Anitra Ford), who Smith has taken on
as a bodyguard; a brief duel between Wonder Woman and Angela is the film's only
significant action sequence, which occurs during the final third of the story.

Jan Michael Vincent interviewed by Paul Rodriguez on The Late Show in 1987. The Late Show talk show aired on FOX, but I found no mention of Rodriquez being a permanent host.

Cheech Marin is also here. All three are in the film BORN in EAST L.A.. Everyone is having a great time during the interview and toward the end Jan-Michael Vincent joins the band, plays bass and sings NYQUIL BLUES.

March 4, 1994

John Candy dies.

The larger-than-life comedic star John Candy dies suddenly of a heart
attack on this day in 1994, at the age of 43. At the time of his death, he was
living near Durango, Mexico, while filming Wagons East, a Western comedy
co-starring the comedian Richard Lewis.

Born in 1950, Candy's first professional acting work was in children's
theater in his native Canada. In 1972, he was accepted into the prestigious
Second City comedy troupe in Toronto, where he would become a regular writer
and performer for the group's television program, SCTV, alongside other
rising comics like Eugene Levy (later Candy's co-star in Splash) and
Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters). When SCTV moved to network
television in 1981, Candy moved with it; that year and the next, he won Emmy
Awards for writing for the show. Candy's recurring (and most famous) SCTV persona
was Yosh Shmenge, a clarinet player in a polka band. He would reprise the
character in a mock documentary, The Last Polka, on HBO in 1985 and
would also play a polka musician in the smash hit Home Alone (1990).

Candy made his big break into movies with Splash (1984), in which he
stole most of his scenes as the idle, high-living brother of the main
character, played by Tom Hanks. The film, directed by Ron Howard, was a smash
hit, jump-starting the careers of Candy, Hanks, Darryl Hannah and Levy. In one
particularly memorable scene, Candy throws himself with abandon around a
racquetball court, using his hefty frame to full comedic effect. Six-foot-three
and weighing as much as 275 pounds, he struggled with dieting over the years,
but his heft undoubtedly contributed to his success as a comic performer.

After Splash, Candy was in high demand as a lovable oaf. He starred
in a number of box-office hits over the next 10 years, including Spaceballs
(1987), and collaborations with the writer, producer and director John Hughes
in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), The Great Outdoors (1988)
and Uncle Buck (1989). A devoted sports fan and co-owner of the Toronto
Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, he was also part owner of House of
Blues, with the actors Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi. In 1993, Candy won praise
for his role as the sensitive coach of an unlikely Jamaican bobsled team in Cool
Runnings (1993).

At the time of his death, Candy had just completed his directorial debut,
the Fox Television movie comedy Hostage for a Day. He had performed
two-thirds of his scenes in Wagons East, which was finished after the
filmmakers' insurance company paid a reported $15 million settlement. Another
recently wrapped movie, Canadian Bacon, was released in 1995. Candy was
survived by his wife, Rosemary, and their two children, Jennifer and Christopher.

March 8th, 1974

The last episode ofThe Brady Bunch aired

"The
Hair-Brained Scheme"

Bobby is convinced he can get rich by selling Neat & Natural Hair Tonic.
Bobby sells Greg a container which turns Greg's hair bright orange on the eve
of his high school commencement. Greg is forced to go to the beauty parlor and
dye his hair back before going to graduation.

Note: Robert Reed does not appear in this episode, due to dispute over the
story involving the non-FDA approved bottle of hair tonic, which he thought was
inane slapstick. After Reed wrote a large memo to the staff and Paramount,
Sherwood Schwartz wrote him out of the episode.

March 9, 1954

Edward R. Murrow See it Now

"A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy"

Edward R. Murrow may not have
scored the first blow against Joseph McCarthy, but he landed a decisive one.
For that, he always will be linked inextricably with the Wisconsin senator, and
remembered by Americans as a champion of liberty and democracy. As early as
1950, Murrow observed on the air that "the weight of the public testimony
has tended to show that so far, Senator McCarthy's charges [againstsuspected
communist subversives] are unproven." On March 9, 1954, Murrow, then the
most respected journalist in America, engaged in a tough exposé of the senator
and his tactics; the last paragraphs of his presentation are indelibly etched
into our history as is the rhetoric of McCarthy himself. In the interest of the
“fairness doctrine,” McCarthy was given an equal amount of time for a rebuttal,
which he delivered in his classic acerbic style on April 6, 1954. This was the
beginning of McCarthy’s downfall.

March 9, 1959

The International Toy Fair in New York premiered Barbie.

That event
was followed by 50 years of Barbie commercials during Saturday morning cartoons.

Friday, March 01, 2019

I was very lucky with 'Soap' and 'Who's the Boss,' which was great fun, and then went on 'Coach' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond.' I've been truly blessed, and the work has all been fun and a joy.

Katherine Helmond

Katherine Marie Helmond1929 – 2019

Katherine Helmond died February 23, 2019 from complications of Alzheimer's disease at her home in Los Angeles.

After her stage debut in As You Like It, she began working in New York in 1955. She later ran a summer theatre in the Catskills for three seasons and taught acting in university theatre programs. She made her television debut in 1962, but would not achieve fame until the 1970s. She also acted on stage, earning a Tony nomination for her performance on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown (1973). Other Broadway productions include Private Lives, Don Juan and Mixed Emotions.

From 1984 to 1992, she played the role of Mona Robinson on the ABC sitcom Who's the Boss?. The show was a ratings success, running for eight seasons and finishing in the Nielsen 'Top 10' four straight years. In 1993, she appeared in one episode of the British version of Who's the Boss?, The Upper Hand.

March 2, 1904

Dr. Seuss born.

Theodor Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss, the author and
illustrator of such beloved children's books as "The Cat in the Hat"
and "Green Eggs and Ham," is born in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Geisel, who used his middle name (which was also his mother's maiden name) as
his pen name, wrote 48 books--including some for adults--that have sold well
over 200 million copies and been translated into multiple languages. Dr. Seuss
books are known for their whimsical rhymes and quirky characters, which have
names like the Lorax and the Sneetches and live in places like Whoville.

Geisel, who was born on March 2, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts, graduated
from Dartmouth College, where he was editor of the school's humor magazine, and
studied at Oxford University. There he met Helen Palmer, his first wife and the
person who encouraged him to become a professional illustrator. Back in
America, Geisel worked as a cartoonist for a variety of magazines and in
advertising.

The first children's book that Geisel wrote and illustrated, "And to Think
That I Saw It On Mulberry Street," was rejected by over two dozen
publishers before making it into print in 1937. Geisel's first bestseller,
"The Cat in the Hat," was published in 1957. The story of a
mischievous cat in a tall striped hat came about after his publisher asked him
to produce a book using 220 new-reader vocabulary words that could serve as an
entertaining alternative to the school reading primers children found boring.

Other Dr. Seuss classics include "Yertle the Turtle," "If I Ran
the Circus," "Fox in Socks" and "One Fish, Two Fish, Red
Fish, Blue Fish."

Some Dr. Seuss books tackled serious themes. "The Butter Battle Book"
(1984) was about the arms buildup and nuclear war threat during Ronald Reagan's
presidency. "Lorax" (1971) dealt with the environment.

Many Dr. Seuss books have been adapted for television and film, including
"How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" and "Horton Hears a Who!"
In 1990, Geisel published a book for adults titled "Oh, the Places You'll
Go" that became a hugely popular graduation gift for high school and
college students.

Geisel, who lived and worked in an old observatory in La Jolla, California,
known as "The Tower," died September 24, 1991, at age 87.

March 2, 1944

For the first time, the Academy Awards are presented
as part of a televised variety show.

Jack Benny served as master of ceremonies for the event, which was held at
Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. Due to lack of network interest, the
show was only broadcast locally, on two Los Angeles TV stations. Winners
included Best Film Going My Way, whose male lead, Bing Crosby, won Best
Actor. Ingrid Bergman won Best Actress for her performance in Gaslight.

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Pre-ramble

I represent the first generation whom, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
Read the full "Pre-ramble"